A splendid Hamas-style beard conceals a very young, boyish face. Only the adult gaze seems to contradict the youthful features. Jaber is 18. His occupation: tunnel excavator. He didn't understand that he was actually given the green light by his employers to tell "the Jew" about his singular profession. He was dumbstruck. The mature
gaze turned into a look of surprise. Secrecy is one of the most important terms of acceptance into a profession that only Rafah could have invented for the local unemployed. The economic ray of light in the city is literally at the end of the tunnel.
Sitting next to Jaber are two of his professional colleagues, Muans and Daud. Both of them, like Jaber, possess a skill which only very unusual or very desperate people are endowed with. All three have the ability to work for long hours underground: Like moles they carve their way relentlessly to the other side. All three prefer the dark of the tunnel to the light of Rafah, which has never done anything for them. With infinite patience, astonishing mental calm and the determination to push forward, they are not deterred by sand, the suffocating conditions or the lack of air.
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How is it possible for someone to be "buried" 12 meters underground for hours at a stretch? They smile bashfully at the question and reply almost in a chorus. "It is nothing, it is not as terrible as it sounds. It's cool down there. Even pleasant." That's right pleasant.
For years I have been trying to locate the tunnel diggers in Rafah and their employers, to interview them, but I never succeeded. Until now.
The Israel Defense Forces was ensconced on the so-called Philadelphi road between Gaza and Rafah and waged a losing battle against the most profitable business in the Gaza
Strip. The army built an ugly, rusty steel wall along the road, believing that by "burying" the wall's foundations six meters underground they would create a tough barrier that the excavators would find difficult to breach. Above ground were five huge concrete bases and around them were tanks, armored vehicles and sophisticated observation and night-vision instruments. But below the diggers deepened the tunnel to 12 meters and rendered useless both the wall and the state-of-the-art defensive equipment above them.
The result was that the top of the steel wall remained suspended in the air, its legs buried six meters down, but not deep enough to stop the human moles, whose simple means made a mockery of the technology that was mustered to try to stop them. The Philadelphi wall remains one more ugly addition to the ugly landscape of Rafah, a wall that is of no use and that offers no deterrence.
Wall of silence In a previous attempt to organize a meeting with the Rafah moles, "informed sources" said: "Are you crazy? Who will agree to put $150,000 at risk so that you can write an article?" Is that the cost of a tunnel, I asked. "No, it costs less to dig a tunnel today, a lot less, the price has gone down," they explained.
It turns out that the IDF's struggle against the diggers and against the owners of the tunnels was not totally in vain. It greatly reduced the technical level of the tunnels, and the cost of digging them declined accordingly. Unlike in the past, the tunnel owners, the "entrepreneurs," understood that there is no chance of building a tunnel that will last for years, so they decided to go for an "instant" tunnel for one good arms-smuggling operation, or at most two, before it would be discovered.
When the IDF left the Gaza Strip this month, the fear of discovery did not vanish entirely, but the tension decreased tremendously. If in the past a reasonable suspicion about the existence of a tunnel led to the firing of a shell at it, now, with the Palestinian Authority in charge of one side of Philadelphi, such a suspicion will lead at most to a few days' interrogation and detention. The risk justifies the huge price that is guaranteed to the tunnel artists.
My "contact," whose identity I promised to keep secret, got me in contact with the diggers, on the condition that I would not photograph the faces of "the children" or
their present "place of work." In the meeting they were mute and silent, incapable of opening up and revealing trade secrets. I suggested that we begin by touring the
smuggling route, in the hope that the wall of silence between us would be breached as the residents of Rafah breached the actual steel wall, which overnight became a
makeshift transit point between Sinai and Gaza. For a few days the smuggling route moved above ground, driving down the price of the smuggled goods by dozens of percent and
leaving the tunnel owners fearful of losing their highly lucrative source of livelihood.
"Don't worry," they told me, "the border will be closed again, the way it was. The owners of the tunnels will see to it that it does not become wide open."
"If so, instead of an agreement with Egypt, Israel could have made an agreement with the owners of tunnels and appointed you people to guard the closed border," I said, and they all laughed at the idea, which to them did not actually sound so far-fetched. Below the road are dozens of dormant tunnels, some of which were destroyed by the IDF but every tunnel can be restored, they say as experts. If the opening is destroyed, a new opening is dug from a different direction, the tunnel is accessed from the middle and so hundreds of meters are saved, after having been dug arduously in the course of months.
Nearly all the tunnels that the IDF destroyed are now undergoing a rehabilitation process. The diggers relate that the owners whose tunnels were discovered and destroyed want to save their enormous financial investment and are already looking for or have already found a new route that will connect them to the section of the tunnel that was not blocked.
"Look at this excavation," Jaber says, pointing and guffawing. "This is what the Jews managed to do. There was a tunnel here not serious." By which he means that it was built by amateurs in a sensitive location, exactly beneath the guarded steel wall, was not deep enough and was discovered. An IDF bulldozer's teeth exposed the winding tunnel and left a kind of curving, deep wadi in its place. The three showed me the now-closed opening, but I could not easily distinguish between a heap of earth and the opening of a tunnel in whose construction tens of thousands of dollars were invested.
How many tunnels are below us here? Muans, laughing: "Ho a lot."
How many? Twenty? "More. Maybe a hundred all along the border, but not all of them are active, especially now after the price went down and the new situation with the Egyptians isn't clear yet. Everyone is on hold, waiting to see how business will be renewed."
The smuggling market To own a tunnel in Rafah is a profitable business. The cost of building an average one, 800 meters long, from the nearby Brazil neighborhood or another one in the vicinity, is approximately $30,000. Another $30,000 has to be added to the cost for paying the owner of the house under which the tunnel is dug a great deal of money in Gaza terms but a drop in the ocean compared to the profits a good tunnel can yield with Gaza's craving for imported merchandise.
As in the stock market, as in any active capital market, here, too, there are ups and downs in the prices of the "goods." When the market was dry and the smuggling route operated lethargically, the price of a Kalashnikov assault rifle soared to $600. In a routine, active market the price ranges between $250 and $300, a price that every
sensible person with an instinct for survival can afford in order to safeguard himself and his family.
When the border was breached and the smuggling proceeded freely, the price of a Kalashnikov plummeted to below $200 almost below cost price, according to the tunnel index. Smart "entrepreneurs" have stopped all subterranean activity until the market regains its balance and gets back to normal operations.
Supply and demand also affect the salary of the "moles." In "good" periods a master excavator could make almost 50 Jordanian dinars (NIS 325) in a day. The first and second
assistants to the team head earn between 30 and 40 dinars, a huge salary in Rafah and Gaza terms.
An active tunnel can yield for the entrepreneur and his partners close to $500,000 in one smuggling operation. Just about everything is smuggled: weapons, ammunition,
explosive charges, hand grenades, drugs and other in-demand merchandise in the Gaza market which Egyptian merchants can offer in abundance. But not only merchandise has passed through the tunnels. People sought by the authorities in Egypt and there are no few of them who flee the wrath of the Mukhbarat, the Egyptian secret service found "political asylum" in Gaza. For 20,000 dinars, the smuggling tunnel can become an escape route. The Rafah entrepreneurs will be pleased to offer a one-way ticket without stewardesses, without meals and without passenger insurance for escapees from Egypt or for those wishing to return to Gaza but have been blocked by Israel.
Sami Abu Samahadana, from a famous family of wanted individuals, is one of those who took this route. Samahadana traveled to Egypt for treatment with the authorization of the Israeli government under then prime minister Ehud Barak. By the time the treatment was completed, elections had been held in Israel and the new prime minister, Ariel Sharon, refused to allow him to return. One night he entered a tunnel and the next morning he was home. Since then he has been wanted by the Israeli authorities.
Esprit de corps We are touring the city of Rafah and the neighborhoods along the border. The diggers wanted to test me, to gauge my reliability before showing me the real thing. The "foreplay" lasts a few hours, during which I learn the secrets of the profession.
We sat on mattresses and pillows in a rented apartment in Rafah's Brazil neighborhood and they made tea and coffee alternately. First the bitter black coffee sadah in their
argot is served; then extremely sweet tea to dissipate the bitterness; and finally the "real" coffee. As we take the tea and coffee together, after they are persuaded that I
have come solely for journalistic purposes and have not been sent by the yahud (Jews) to collect intelligence about them, they reveal another aspect of the trade secrets.
After a suitable house has been located under which a tunnel can be dug, the entrepreneur negotiates its purchase with the owner. The only condition for the deal to go through: Everyone in the family will continue to live in the house and go about their business routinely. Even the neighbors must not know. The smallest mistake and everyone is in danger. In the tunnel business, every mistake is fateful, every mistake puts life at risk.
Daud sipped his tea, lit a cigarette and continued: "The entrepreneur asks the owner how much the house costs. And he tells him, my house is worth 3,000 dinars. Ya'ani, he
exaggerated the price of the house, which is perforated from bullets that slammed into it all through the intifada. But the merchant does not argue. Take 10,000 in cash and another 10,000 when the work is done, he says, on condition that you all live in one room and don't say a word about the work. The deal is closed with a handshake and in the hope that all of them will benefit from the transaction."
"Partnership is also possible," Jaber adds. "If there is a big house, in which all the unoccupied rooms can be filled with the sand instead of dealing with dangerous removal,
the owner haggles with the entrepreneur and demands part of the profits."
Daud: "After the house is purchased, we wait two weeks to a month to see how the people behave. Only after that do we start to plan the work and bring in the tools, slowly,
without the neighbors seeing or knowing that anything is going on. We start the noisy work of digging a hole in the floor of the house. And from there we begin."
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